Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics
J Lee Thompson
John Murray £28, pp368
Buy it at BOL
Monster or a genius? Lord Northcliffe's biographers have always invited us to choose. The virtue of J. Lee Thompson's studious contribution to Harmsworthiana is that, at least implicitly, he recognises that there are no simple choices. The first great press baron of the modern age may have been gripped by monstrous delusions as his life ended in madness, but he was also a newspaper genius.
The facts tell their own cool story. Here's Alfred Harmsworth, first son of an affably unsuccessful barrister, looking for a career. He leaves school at 16 and scratches a freelance living from the Hampstead and Highgate Express. No silver spoons. At 20 (in 1885), he's editor of Bicycling News. Two years on, he's invented his first mass market magazine, Answers, and the road to glory opens before him. A magazine empire floated at 28; the London Evening News bought at 29; the founding of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror; the purchase of The Observer and the Times; the youngest peer ever created, at 40. He had a blinding talent for innovation. Essentially, he invented our national press.
When he went to New York in 1901, Joseph Pulitzer of the World (and the prize) challenged him to produce the 'newspaper of the future'. He did it alone in a handful of days; a tabloid offering of 'All the News in 60 Seconds', which brilliantly encapsulated all the trends of the century to come. Genius.
Where, though, is the man who Hugh Cudlipp once described as the desecrator of good journalism in 'his pursuit of political power unguided by political prescience?' He is here, too; Thompson portrays him whole - not as some Citizen Kane, but as a thoughtful stripling whose philosophy 'combined Tory populism, Disraelian imperialism and a firm belief in the "Anglo-Saxon future",' which is a pretty fair take on even today's Daily Mail.
Politics intrigued him, to be sure, yet he also, at least in the beginning, knew where the lines of freedom and influence should be drawn. He appointed Garvin to The Observer and when, at last, the two fell out over imperial preference, he sold the paper on to Waldorf Astor, rather than sack his editor. His guarantees of independence for the Times lasted longer than many expected and fractured, at the close, as much on its dozy lack of new editorial thinking as any single issue of politics.
Northcliffe, to be fair, was originally no manic seeker of power. Rather, the politicians, seeing the influence his papers had begun to wield, crawled to him, just as their ancestors flock to pay court to Rupert Murdoch. And he was by no means always wrong. He was right to see the dangers of war with Germany and right again to flay the inert prosecution of that dreadful conflict once it came. His sense of country and service to it was strong.
He was also, in his way, a casualty of war. We all know - from the Falklands to the Gulf - how battlefields tear up the rulebooks of decent journalism, how Whitehall twists in the 'national interest'; by that time, Northcliffe was an insider as well as an outsider. His own rulebooks went missing in action. But he was never an armchair critic. Sickly, exhausted, he'd still go to the fronts of France to see and learn for himself. The dementia at the close was a cruel line drawn under this life.
Lee Thompson's account is by no means all-embracing. He leaves out the private Northcliffe (and tiptoes away from the family moralist who fathered three kids by a mistress). There's no clue (the Times aside) how Northcliffe picked the teams of editors and reporters who made his papers. Too many chapters consist of little more than history lessons with quotes from Mail leaders as commentaries. (What did Northcliffe write himself? How did his empire survive his interminable holidays of recuperation?) Nevertheless, the bones for judgment are here, and, with them, one inexorable conundrum: how do we want our newspapers owned? What are proprietors supposed to do?
There's no single answer to that, but it's necessary to say that without Harmsworth, many newspapers of today would never have existed. He knew instinctively where the readers of the twentieth century were. He reached out to them, included them in the debate. Was he supposed, after that, to sit vapidly to one side? Human impossibility. You bought the whole package, and you did, in your millions, buy.
